"After Kerlikowske, What’s Next for America’s ‘War on Drugs’?"

The title of this post is the headline of this lengthy new commentary by Ted Gest over at The Crime Report.  Here are excerpts from a piece that draws in large part from a notable new article on the topic appearing in Volume 42 of Crime and Justice:

“No one is happy with American drug policy,” Peter Reuter of the University of Maryland declares in a new overview of a debate that hasn’t changed dramatically in the last three decades. Reuter’s assessment (“Why has American Drug Policy Changed so Little in 30 years”) appears in a sweeping review of U.S. criminal justice published this month: Crime and Justice in America, Volume 42, 1975-2025, University of Chicago Press, 2013)

With the U.S. government awaiting a new “drug czar” — President Barack Obama has nominated current National Drug Control Policy Director R. Gil Kerlikowske to head the federal border protection agency — The Crime Report takes a look at Reuter’s views in some detail.  The following summarizes Reuter’s principal arguments, but also includes new material not included in his original essay. The entire book can be ordered here....

Reuter makes [these] major assertions:

• Marijuana must be treated separately as a social and criminal justice problem. It hardly touches the central problem of American criminal justice — the high incarceration of minorities — nor does it cause significant health and social harms.

• Harm reduction, the idea that governments should pay attention to the harmfulness of drug use (not just to the number of users of drugs) is a big idea that has importantly changed drug policy in much of the Western world. In the United States, among the core harm reduction programs, only methadone maintenance has been accepted.

• Legalization, the idea that drugs such as cocaine and heroin should be treated like alcohol and be made available legally under substantial regulatory restrictions, deserves separate discussion. Though Reuter argues it has no appeal to the general public, it attracts a great deal of interest from the educated elite and from some Latin American presidents.

• The prevalence of drug use, the most widely reported measure of drug problems, is not a good target for drug policy. Policy should be oriented toward reducing violence, dysfunction, and disease related to drug use and to reducing the use of incarceration and reducing racial disparities in incarceration....

Contrary to the assumptions of many policymakers, there is very little evidence that enforcement can raise prices or reduce availability, the mechanisms through which it might reduce the prevalence of use. During a period of massively increased enforcement intensity (1980-2008), the retail prices of heroin and cocaine both fell about 70 percent.

If drug policy cannot affect prevalence, what can it do? We do know, writes Reuter, that bad policy choices can make drug use, drug distribution and production more harmful. For example, if the police choose to use possession of prohibited syringes as the basis for targeting heroin injectors, they may accelerate the spread of HIV....

The drug problem changes in unforeseen ways with occasional epidemics that are unpredictable in their occurrence and magnitude. For example, the use of diverted prescription drugs constitutes a significant and disturbing public health problem.